The European Rationalist – In Reason We Trust

New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior – compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops – that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.

Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine and roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment.

In an analysis of the images appearing  (recently) in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn. In a separate, continuing experiment, the researchers are analyzing brain images from people who have been rejected by their lovers.

“When you’re in the throes of this romantic love it’s overwhelming, you’re out of control, you’re irrational, you’re going to the gym at 6 a.m. every day – why? Because she’s there,” said Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and the co-author of the analysis. “And when rejected, some people contemplate stalking, homicide, suicide. This drive for romantic love can be stronger than the will to live.”

Brain imaging technology cannot read people’s minds, experts caution, and a phenomenon as many sided and socially influenced as love transcends simple computer graphics, like those produced by the technique used in the study, called functional M.R.I.

Still, said Dr. Hans Breiter, director of the Motivation and Emotion Neuroscience Collaboration at Massachusetts General Hospital, “I distrust about 95 percent of the M.R.I. literature and I would give this study an ‘A’; it really moves the ball in terms of understanding infatuation love.”

He added: “The findings fit nicely with a large, growing body of literature describing a generalized reward and aversion system in the brain, and put this intellectual construct of love directly onto the same axis as homeostatic rewards such as food, warmth, craving for drugs.”

In the study, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, led a team that analyzed about 2,500 brain images from 17 college students who were in the first weeks or months of new love. The students looked at a picture of their beloved while an M.R.I. machine scanned their brains. The researchers then compared the images with others taken while the students looked at picture of an acquaintance.

Functional M.R.I. technology detects increases or decreases of blood flow in the brain, which reflect changes in neural activity.

In the study, a computer-generated map of particularly active areas showed hot spots deep in the brain, below conscious awareness, in areas called the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area, which communicate with each other as part of a circuit.

These areas are dense with cells that produce or receive a brain chemical called dopamine, which circulates actively when people desire or anticipate a reward. In studies of gamblers, cocaine users and even people playing computer games for small amounts of money, these dopamine sites become extremely active as people score or win, neuroscientists say.

Yet falling in love is among the most irrational of human behaviors, not merely a matter of satisfying a simple pleasure, or winning a reward. And the researchers found that one particular spot in the M.R.I. images, in the caudate nucleus, was especially active in people who scored highly on a questionnaire measuring passionate love.

This passion-related region was on the opposite side of the brain from another area that registers physical attractiveness, the researchers found, and appeared to be involved in longing, desire and the unexplainable tug that people feel toward one person, among many attractive alternative partners.

This distinction, between finding someone attractive and desiring him or her, between liking and wanting, “is all happening in an area of the mammalian brain that takes care of most basic functions, like eating, drinking, eye movements, all at an unconscious level, and I don’t think anyone expected this part of the brain to be so specialized,” Dr. Brown said.

The intoxication of new love mellows with time, of course, and the brain scan findings reflect some evidence of this change, Dr. Fisher said.

In an earlier functional M.R.I. study of romance, published in 2000, researchers at University College London monitored brain activity in young men and women who had been in relationships for about two years. The brain images, also taken while participants looked at photos of their beloved, showed activation in many of the same areas found in the new study – but significantly less so, in the region correlated with passionate love, she said.

In the new study, the researchers also saw individual differences in their group of smitten lovers, based on how long the participants had been in the relationships. Compared with the students who were in the first weeks of a new love, those who had been paired off for a year or more showed significantly more activity in an area of the brain linked to long-term commitment.

Last summer, scientists at Emory University in Atlanta reported that injecting a ratlike animal called a vole with a single gene turned promiscuous males into stay-at-home dads – by activating precisely the same area of the brain where researchers in the new study found increased activity over time.

“This is very suggestive of attachment processes taking place,” Dr. Brown said. “You can almost imagine a time where instead of going to Match.com you could have a test to find out whether you’re an attachment type or not.”

One reason new love is so heart-stopping is the possibility, the ever-present fear, that the feeling may not be entirely requited, that the dream could suddenly end.

In a follow-up experiment, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Aron and Dr. Brown have carried out brain scans on 17 other young men and women who recently were dumped by their lovers. As in the new love study, the researchers compared two sets of images, one taken when the participants were looking at a photo of a friend, the other when looking at a picture of their ex.

Although they are still sorting through the images, the investigators have noticed one preliminary finding: increased activation in an area of the brain related to the region associated with passionate love. “It seems to suggest what the psychological literature, poetry and people have long noticed: that being dumped actually does heighten romantic love, a phenomenon I call frustration-attraction,” Dr. Fisher said in an e-mail message.

One volunteer in the study was Suzanna Katz, 22, of New York, who suffered through a breakup with her boyfriend three years ago. Ms. Katz said she became hyperactive to distract herself after the split, but said she also had moments of almost physical withdrawal, as if weaning herself from a drug.

“It had little to do with him, but more with the fact that there was something there, inside myself, a hope, a knowledge that there’s someone out there for you, and that you’re capable of feeling this way, and suddenly I felt like that was being lost,” she said in an interview.

And no wonder. In a series of studies, researchers have found that, among other processes, new love involves psychologically internalizing a lover, absorbing elements of the other person’s opinions, hobbies, expressions, character, as well as sharing one’s own. “The expansion of the self happens very rapidly, it’s one of the most exhilarating experiences there is, and short of threatening our survival it is one thing that most motivates us,” said Dr. Aron, of SUNY, a co-author of the study.

To lose all that, all at once, while still in love, plays havoc with the emotional, cognitive and deeper reward-driven areas of the brain. But the heightened activity in these areas inevitably settles down. And the circuits in the brain related to passion remain intact, the researchers say – intact and capable in time of flaring to life with someone new.

• Leave a comment... (0)

If the entire human species were a single individual, that person would long ago have been declared mad. The insanity would not lie in the anger and darkness of the human mind-though it can be a black and raging place indeed. And it certainly wouldn’t lie in the transcendent goodness of that mind-one so sublime, we fold it into a larger “soul.” The madness would lie instead in the fact that both of those qualities, the savage and the splendid, can exist in one creature, one person, often in one instant.

We’re a species that is capable of almost dumbfounding kindness. We nurse one another, romance one another, weep for one another. Ever since science taught us how, we willingly tear the very organs from our bodies and give them to one another. And at the same time, we slaughter one another. The past 15 years of human history are the temporal equivalent of those subatomic particles that are created in accelerators and vanish in a trillionth of a second, but in that fleeting instant, we’ve visited untold horrors on ourselves-in Mogadishu, Rwanda, Chechnya, Darfur, Beslan, Baghdad, Pakistan, London, Madrid, Lebanon, Israel, New York City, Abu Ghraib, Oklahoma City, an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania-all of the crimes committed by the highest, wisest, most principled species the planet has produced. That we’re also the lowest, cruelest, most blood-drenched species is our shame-and our paradox.

The deeper that science drills into the substrata of behavior, the harder it becomes to preserve the vanity that we are unique among Earth’s creatures. We’re the only species with language, we told ourselves-until gorillas and chimps mastered sign language. We’re the only one that uses tools then-but that’s if you don’t count otters smashing mollusks with rocks or apes stripping leaves from twigs and using them to fish for termites.

What does, or ought to, separate us then is our highly developed sense of morality, a primal understanding of good and bad, of right and wrong, of what it means to suffer not only our own pain-something anything with a rudimentary nervous system can do-but also the pain of others. That quality is the distilled essence of what it means to be human. Why it’s an essence that so often spoils, no one can say.

Morality may be a hard concept to grasp, but we acquire it fast. A preschooler will learn that it’s not all right to eat in the classroom, because the teacher says it’s not. If the rule is lifted and eating is approved, the child will happily comply. But if the same teacher says it’s also O.K. to push another student off a chair, the child hesitates. “He’ll respond, ‘No, the teacher shouldn’t say that,’” says psychologist Michael Schulman, co-author of Bringing Up a Moral Child. In both cases, somebody taught the child a rule, but the rule against pushing has a stickiness about it, one that resists coming unstuck even if someone in authority countenances it. That’s the difference between a matter of morality and one of mere social convention, and Schulman and others believe kids feel it innately.

Of course, the fact is, that child will sometimes hit and won’t feel particularly bad about it either-unless he’s caught. The same is true for people who steal or despots who slaughter. “Moral judgment is pretty consistent from person to person,” says Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of Moral Minds. “Moral behavior, however, is scattered all over the chart.” The rules we know, even the ones we intuitively feel, are by no means the rules we always follow.

Where do those intuitions come from? And why are we so inconsistent about following where they lead us? Scientists can’t yet answer those questions, but that hasn’t stopped them from looking. Brain scans are providing clues. Animal studies are providing more. Investigations of tribal behavior are providing still more. None of this research may make us behave better, not right away at least. But all of it can help us understand ourselves-a small step up from savagery perhaps, but an important one.

The Moral Ape

The deepest foundation on which morality is built is the phenomenon of empathy, the understanding that what hurts me would feel the same way to you. And human ego notwithstanding, it’s a quality other species share.

The deepest foundation on which morality is built is the phenomenon of empathy, the understanding that what hurts me would feel the same way to you. And human ego notwithstanding, it’s a quality other species share.It’s not surprising that animals far less complex than we are would display a trait that’s as generous of spirit as empathy, particularly if you decide there’s no spirit involved in it at all. Behaviorists often reduce what we call empathy to a mercantile business known as reciprocal altruism. A favor done today-food offered, shelter given-brings a return favor tomorrow. If a colony of animals practices that give-and-take well, the group thrives.

But even in animals, there’s something richer going on. One of the first and most poignant observations of empathy in nonhumans was made by Russian primatologist Nadia Kohts, who studied nonhuman cognition in the first half of the 20th century and raised a young chimpanzee in her home. When the chimp would make his way to the roof of the house, ordinary strategies for bringing him down-calling, scolding, offers of food-would rarely work. But if Kohts sat down and pretended to cry, the chimp would go to her immediately. “He runs around me as if looking for the offender,” she wrote. “He tenderly takes my chin in his palm … as if trying to understand what is happening.”

You hardly have to go back to the early part of the past century to find such accounts. Even cynics went soft at the story of Binta Jua, the gorilla who in 1996 rescued a 3-year-old boy who had tumbled into her zoo enclosure, rocking him gently in her arms and carrying him to a door where trainers could enter and collect him. “The capacity of empathy is multilayered,” says primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University, author of Our Inner Ape. “We share a core with lots of animals.”

While it’s impossible to directly measure empathy in animals, in humans it’s another matter. Hauser cites a study in which spouses or unmarried couples underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they were subjected to mild pain. They were warned before each time the painful stimulus was administered, and their brains lit up in a characteristic way signaling mild dread. They were then told that they were not going to feel the discomfort but that their partner was. Even when they couldn’t see their partner, the brains of the subjects lit up precisely as if they were about to experience the pain themselves. “This is very much an ‘I feel your pain’ experience,” says Hauser.

The brain works harder when the threat gets more complicated. A favorite scenario that morality researchers study is the trolley dilemma. You’re standing near a track as an out-of-control train hurtles toward five unsuspecting people. There’s a switch nearby that would let you divert the train onto a siding. Would you do it? Of course. You save five lives at no cost. Suppose a single unsuspecting man was on the siding? Now the mortality score is 5 to 1. Could you kill him to save the others? What if the innocent man was on a bridge over the trolley and you had to push him onto the track to stop the train?

Pose these dilemmas to people while they’re in an fMRI, and the brain scans get messy. Using a switch to divert the train toward one person instead of five increases activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex-the place where cool, utilitarian choices are made. Complicate things with the idea of pushing the innocent victim, and the medial frontal cortex-an area associated with emotion-lights up. As these two regions do battle, we may make irrational decisions. In a recent survey, 85% of subjects who were asked about the trolley scenarios said they would not push the innocent man onto the tracks-even though they knew they had just sent five people to their hypothetical death. “What’s going on in our heads?” asks Joshua Greene, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University. “Why do we say it’s O.K. to trade one life for five in one case and not others?”

How We Stay Good

Merely being equipped with moral programming does not mean we practice moral behavior. Something still has to boot up that software and configure it properly, and that something is the community. Hauser believes that all of us carry what he calls a sense of moral grammar-the ethical equivalent of the basic grasp of speech that most linguists believe is with us from birth. But just as syntax is nothing until words are built upon it, so too is a sense of right and wrong useless until someone teaches you how to apply it.

Merely being equipped with moral programming does not mean we practice moral behavior. Something still has to boot up that software and configure it properly, and that something is the community. Hauser believes that all of us carry what he calls a sense of moral grammar-the ethical equivalent of the basic grasp of speech that most linguists believe is with us from birth. But just as syntax is nothing until words are built upon it, so too is a sense of right and wrong useless until someone teaches you how to apply it.It’s the people around us who do that teaching-often quite well. Once again, however, humans aren’t the ones who dreamed up such a mentoring system. At the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands, de Waal was struck by how vigorously apes enforced group norms one evening when the zookeepers were calling their chimpanzees in for dinner. The keepers’ rule at Arnhem was that no chimps would eat until the entire community was present, but two adolescents grew willful, staying outside the building. The hours it took to coax them inside caused the mood in the hungry colony to turn surly. That night the keepers put the delinquents to bed in a separate area-a sort of protective custody to shield them from reprisals. But the next day the adolescents were on their own, and the troop made its feelings plain, administering a sound beating. The chastened chimps were the first to come in that evening. Animals have what de Waal calls “oughts”-rules that the group must follow-and the community enforces them.

Human communities impose their own oughts, but they can vary radically from culture to culture. Take the phenomenon of Good Samaritan laws that require passersby to assist someone in peril. Our species has a very conflicted sense of when we ought to help someone else and when we ought not, and the general rule is, Help those close to home and ignore those far away. That’s in part because the plight of a person you can see will always feel more real than the problems of someone whose suffering is merely described to you. But part of it is also rooted in you from a time when the welfare of your tribe was essential for your survival but the welfare of an opposing tribe was not-and might even be a threat.

In the 21st century, we retain a powerful remnant of that primal dichotomy, which is what impels us to step in and help a mugging victim-or, in the astonishing case of Wesley Autrey, New York City’s so-called Subway Samaritan, jump onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train to rescue a sick stranger-but allows us to decline to send a small contribution to help the people of Darfur. “The idea that you can save the life of a stranger on the other side of the world by making a modest material sacrifice is not the kind of situation our social brains are prepared for,” says Greene.

Throughout most of the world, you’re still not required to aid a stranger, but in France and elsewhere, laws now make it a crime for passersby not to provide at least the up-close-and-personal aid we’re good at giving. In most of the U.S., we make a distinction between an action and an omission to act. Says Hauser: “In France they’ve done away with that difference.”

But you don’t need a state to create a moral code. The group does it too. One of the most powerful tools for enforcing group morals is the practice of shunning. If membership in a tribe is the way you ensure yourself food, family and protection from predators, being blackballed can be a terrifying thing. Religious believers as diverse as Roman Catholics, Mennonites and Jehovah’s Witnesses have practiced their own forms of shunning-though the banishments may go by names like excommunication or disfellowshipping. Clubs, social groups and fraternities expel undesirable members, and the U.S. military retains the threat of discharge as a disciplinary tool, even grading the punishment as “other than honorable” or “dishonorable,” darkening the mark a former service person must carry for life.

Sometimes shunning emerges spontaneously when a society of millions recoils at a single member’s acts. O.J. Simpson’s 1995 acquittal may have outraged people, but it did make the morality tale surrounding him much richer, as the culture as a whole turned its back on him, denying him work, expelling him from his country club, refusing him service in a restaurant. In November his erstwhile publisher, who was fired in the wake of her and Simpson’s disastrous attempt to publish a book about the killings, sued her ex-employer, alleging that she had been “shunned” and “humiliated.” That, her former bosses might well respond, was precisely the point.

“Human beings were small, defenseless and vulnerable to predators,” says Barbara J. King, biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary and author of Evolving God. “Avoiding banishment would be important to us.”

Why We Turn Bad

With so many redundant moral systems to keep us in line, why do we so often fall out of ranks? Sometimes we can’t help it, as when we’re suffering from clinical insanity and behavior slips the grip of reason. Criminal courts are stingy about finding such exculpatory madness, requiring a disability so severe, the defendant didn’t even know the crime was wrong. That’s a very high bar that prevents all but a few from proving the necessary moral numbness.

With so many redundant moral systems to keep us in line, why do we so often fall out of ranks? Sometimes we can’t help it, as when we’re suffering from clinical insanity and behavior slips the grip of reason. Criminal courts are stingy about finding such exculpatory madness, requiring a disability so severe, the defendant didn’t even know the crime was wrong. That’s a very high bar that prevents all but a few from proving the necessary moral numbness.Things are different in the case of the cool and deliberate serial killer, who knows the criminality of his deeds yet continues to commit them. For neuroscientists, the iciness of the acts calls to mind the case of Phineas Gage, the Vermont railway worker who in 1848 was injured when an explosion caused a tamping iron to be driven through his prefrontal cortex. Improbably, he survived, but he exhibited stark behavioral changes-becoming detached and irreverent, though never criminal. Ever since, scientists have looked for the roots of serial murder in the brain’s physical state.

A study published last year in the journal NeuroImage may have helped provide some answers. Researchers working through the National Institute of Mental Health scanned the brains of 20 healthy volunteers, watching their reactions as they were presented with various legal and illegal scenarios. The brain activity that most closely tracked the hypothetical crimes-rising and falling with the severity of the scenarios-occurred in the amygdala, a deep structure that helps us make the connection between bad acts and punishments. As in the trolley studies, there was also activity in the frontal cortex. The fact that the subjects themselves had no sociopathic tendencies limits the value of the findings. But knowing how the brain functions when things work well is one good way of knowing where to look when things break down.

Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of us never run off the moral rails in remotely as awful a way as serial killers do, but we do come untracked in smaller ways. We face our biggest challenges not when we’re called on to behave ourselves within our family, community or workplace but when we have to apply the same moral care to people outside our tribe.

The notion of the “other” is a tough one for Homo sapiens. Sociobiology has been criticized as one of the most reductive of sciences, ascribing the behavior of all living things-humans included-as nothing more than an effort to get as many genes as possible into the next generation. The idea makes sense, and all creatures can be forgiven for favoring their troop over others. But such bias turns dark fast.

Schulman, the psychologist and author, works with delinquent adolescents at a residential treatment center in Yonkers, New York, and was struck one day by the outrage that swept through the place when the residents learned that three of the boys had mugged an elderly woman. “I wouldn’t mug an old lady. That could be my grandmother,” one said. Schulman asked whom it would be O.K. to mug. The boy answered, “A Chinese delivery guy.” Explains Schulman: “The old lady is someone they could empathize with. The Chinese delivery guy is alien, literally and figuratively, to them.”

This kind of brutal line between insiders and outsiders is evident everywhere-mobsters, say, who kill promiscuously yet go on rhapsodically about “family.” But it has its most terrible expression in wars, in which the dehumanization of the outsider is essential for wholesale slaughter to occur. Volumes have been written about what goes on in the collective mind of a place like Nazi Germany or the collapsing Yugoslavia. While killers like Adolf Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic can never be put on the couch, it’s possible to understand the xenophobic strings they play in their people.

“Yugoslavia is the great modern example of manipulating tribal sentiments to create mass murder,” says Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “You saw it in Rwanda and Nazi Germany too. In most cases of genocide, you have a moral entrepreneur who exploits tribalism for evil purposes.”

That, of course, does not take the stain of responsibility off the people who follow those leaders-a case that war-crimes prosecutors famously argued at the Nuremberg trials and a point courageous people have made throughout history as they sheltered Jews during World War II or refuse to murder their Sunni neighbor even if a militia leader tells them to.

For grossly imperfect creatures like us, morality may be the steepest of all developmental mountains. Our opposable thumbs and big brains gave us the tools to dominate the planet, but wisdom comes more slowly than physical hardware. We surely have a lot of killing and savagery ahead of us before we fully civilize ourselves. The hope-a realistic one, perhaps-is that the struggles still to come are fewer than those left behind.

What Makes Us Moral, By Jerry Kluger, published in Time Magazine, 2007

• Leave a comment... (0)

Book Review: Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, edited by Richard D.  Lane, M.D., Ph.D., and Lynn Nadel, Ph.D. New York, Oxford University Press, 2000, 431 pp., $60.00; $35.00 (paper).

Evidence linking specific psychological faculties to localized brain areas has been available for only 150 years, yet distinctions among the features of mental life have been made for thousands of years. Aristotle, for example, divided brain function into cognitive, emotive, and willful processes. This ancient distinction between cognition and emotion is reflected in the structure of the various DSMs of APA, which begin with a section on the disorders of cognition and distinguish them from disorders of mood, and in most training programs, where psychiatrists receive little training in the disorders of cognition and neurologists receive little or no training in the disorders of emotion.

The utility of the distinction between cognition and emotion and questions about its grounding in the brain’s neural substrate are explored in Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion.  This volume is the product of a meeting held at the University of Arizona and is to be commended for presenting a variety of viewpoints on this fascinating question.

Is an alternative view viable? Does research support the view that the distinction between emotion and cognition is artificial? The book addresses these questions by beginning with overviews by Damasio and by Clore and Ortony. They review studies in which techniques used by cognitive scientists have been applied to the study of emotion. Damasio concludes that emotions and feelings should be distinguished and that the failure to make this distinction lies behind the paucity of studies in the brain basis of emotion. The evidence that he offers to support his view is weak, but he does demonstrate the value of studying both emotion and cognition with the same neuropsychological and imaging methods.  The distinction between emotion as an externally observable state and feelings as an internal experiential state could be validated if distinct physiological substrates were found for the two. Even if the distinction cannot be supported, it may serve a utilitarian purpose because physiological responses are easier to study. At this point in history, claims that the internal experience of feelings (or emotions) will yield to the methods of neuroscience are similar to the claim that the neural basis of consciousness will be discovered-promises rather than results.  Nevertheless, data-based approaches to these issues are the only way to move beyond the realm of rhetoric. 

The second section of this book reviews the potential role of the amygdala in the genesis, persistence, and interpretation of emotion. The demonstration that emotional expression is associated with a locus or loci does not prove that the distinction between cognition and emotion is artificial, but these chapters review a wide range of experiments whose results suggest that processes traditionally called “cognitive” are operative in animal behaviors that appear to reflect human emotion.  The third section reviews human research more directly.  Lesion studies and skin conductance studies support the contention that the amygdala is involved in human emotion, but they also demonstrate the involvement of other brain regions.  The hypothesis that the complex mental phenomena we refer to as emotion involve multiple structures, pathways, and molecular mechanisms is supported by much more data than the hypothesis that there is a single “emotion center.” The last section of the book examines the effects of brain lesions on emotional function. Again, there is abundant evidence linking emotional activation to multiple neural pathways.  This line of work does not directly address whether cognition and emotion are distinct or entwined brain capacities, but it does provide a set of methods by which neural mechanisms can be dissected.
Although the central question of the book is yet to be answered, this volume demonstrates clearly that the emotion/ cognition interface is an important area of study and that progress is being made along many fronts. The ultimate answer may well be that both views of the emotion/cognition dichotomy are true: these states share some circuitry and molecular mechanisms but also involve distinct loci and mechanisms. A much better understanding of the neural substrates of both emotion and cognition will undoubtedly develop, but new conceptual models of CNS organization and function may be needed before a comprehensive understanding emerges.  Readers interested in the even more radical view that our current conception of the term “emotion” needs to be rethought and perhaps even discarded will enjoy Paul Griffiths book, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (1).

Reference
1. Griffiths PE: What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997

PETER V. RABINS, M.D., M.P.H.
Baltimore, Md

• Leave a comment... (0)

Business ethics, it seems, has finally caught the attention of economists. Businesses, in some parts of the world, have become integral participants in such causes as protecting the environment and alleviating poverty from economically depressed localities. This investment in ethics, however, is confronted with the problem that economists have no other way to approach reality without concentrating on questions of utility. A similar phenomenon is occurring within the economics profession, where economists such as James Buchanan¹ and Amartya Sen² have become outspoken advocates for social and ethical investing through work, savings, and company loyalty.

For these values, altruistic behavior can be analyzed as a positive external effect of consumption, where the individual makes a voluntary contribution. Buchanan and Sen both rely upon utilitarianism for their analysis of voluntary contributions, although they acknowledge that society would be aided if these values were more independently established. From the vantage point of society, however, it would be beneficial for the values of social and ethical investing to be more firmly grounded in a consistent rationale. Utilitarianism provides a poor basis for such analysis and can be manipulated easily for less than admirable purposes. For these values to be widely accepted, they should not be related to any order of values that exceeds the simple test of social well-being. Sen states this principle thus:

The nature of modern economics has been substantially impoverished by the distance that has grown between economics and ethics … [economics] can be more productive by paying greater and more explicit attention to the ethical considerations that shape human behaviour and judgement. It is not my purpose to write off what has been or is being achieved, but definitely to demand more.³

In the last twenty years, economists and moral philosophers have renewed a conversation that was interrupted during the heyday of positivist methodology in both disciplines.⁴ While considerable gaps remain between the modes of expression and habits of thought in these disciplines, there is today considerable room for productive interdisciplinary dialogue between economists and moral philosophers.

This change in the validity of using ethical-moral values in economic analysis has little to do with the criticism of nineteenth-century authors such as Thomas Carlyle or John Ruskin, who attributed the destruction of social ties to the influence of capitalism. According to them, moral values functioned as the backbone of society during the late Victorian era. The destruction of social ties can be attributed more to the Weberian work ethic than to the structure of a market economy.

We are, perhaps, in the final stage of the process that economic science began in the eighteenth century, namely, its search for disciplinary boundaries and foundations. The first phase of this process sought to separate morals and politics. It was sometime later, however, that Adam Smith and David Ricardo began to establish economics as a respectable science. Since the late-eighteenth century, economics has developed independent disciplinary foundations and, in successive stages, has subjected more and more domains of human life to economic analysis. This phenomenon has come to be known in the literature as the “imperialism of economics.”⁵

Nowadays, economics is viewed as the social subsystem with the greatest capacity to integrate the other social sciences. Yet, surprisingly and for good reason, in recent years the relationship between ethics and economics has become much less hostile. In order to illustrate this change, it may be useful to compare the relationship between ethics and economics at the dawning of the modern age (where the economic aspect played a relatively insignificant role in moral science) and in our time (where the growing interest of economists is to analyze the economic implications of ethical conduct). That Alfred Marshall knew how to extract the essence of this process can be seen in his now-famous quip: “The servant has turned into the housewife.” From this point forward the ethical aspect would be placed in a similar trajectory with economics-although in quite different circumstances.

The preceding raises two related questions, which this article will address separately: (1) What are the historical factors that led to the progressive emancipation of economics from moral science, and, ultimately, to its status as an independent discipline? (2) As a result of this emancipation, has the relationship between ethics and economics been fundamentally altered? Or, has this fundamental shift provoked a renewed interest in ethics on the part of economists?

How Economic Science Discovered Its Limits

Economics was, in its origin, integrally related to ethics. Sen reminds us of the contrast between the “non-ethical” feature of modern economics and its genesis as an offshoot of ethics.⁶ At the time of its inception, then, the language of economics was comprised of normative elements. Nevertheless, over time, economics came to be considered an autonomous science, and its language and value judgments become increasingly more “positive.”

This dissociation of economics from ethics is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it is regarded by some as beneficial, enabling economists to develop analytic techniques and make rational predictions of future human behavior, whereas others view these “benefits” as fatal flaws leading to the imperialism of economic analysis over ethics. As analyzed, the transformation with respect to the traditional order of medieval times was finally complete.

In traditional societies, there is a multiplicity of small communities, including kinship networks and dispersed ethnic groups.⁷ Between these communities market interchange is often restricted, and economic life is regulated by local conventions. Markets may exist within such communities, but they are embedded in wider systems of non-market relationships, and the behavior of transactors is governed by complex moral codes and informal sanctions.

The first indication of emancipation with respect to moral norms became visible during the resultant secularization of the Renaissance. Consequently, morals were siphoned off from other public domains such as politics and economics. The process of separation that began during the Renaissance fostered a gradual substitution of morals for a “worldly providence”: the belief in a charitable role for the market. The rise of the market order changed this situation dramatically. It broke down the old ties of community by integrating them into an extensive division of labor governed by the abstract logic of commodity exchange.⁸ Personal ties between producers were replaced by the anonymous process of commercial transactions. Furthermore, this transformation required a change in the nature of morality itself. It is difficult to see how any kind of general morality can arise spontaneously from an entirely anonymous process of exchange.

Furthermore, the birth of national states during the sixteenth century had the effect of accelerating a tendency that is now termed the politicizing of wealth. The growing necessities of the new states forced economists, merchants, and bureaucrats to search for more stable sources of wealth. There was a mutual relation of interdependency between consumers and producers, but wealth was now subordinated to political power. Mercantilism, as it came to be called, made no sense because it did not allow for the possibility of distinguishing political from economic history. Thus, politics predominated, and the relation with the economy was hierarchically ordered.

The new argument was that moral categories were applicable to small societies but not to the powerful new nation states. In mercantilist doctrine, wealth (economics) and power (politics) appear to be mixed, which means that economic policies are decided upon through political mechanisms. In the end, the prosperity and the power of the state are what is sought after. The term political economy (Montchretien) appears now in order to designate the study of “economic” media to surmise “political” ends, which entails that the acquisition of wealth is at the service of political power. Thus, economic boundaries begin to offer the first steps under the vigilant protection of its older sibling-politics.

Adam Smith functions not as a link to this process but rather as a purveyor of a series of ideas. However, on the level of principle, Smith completes the rupture between economics and politics, although the transition takes place in successive stages. The decisive innovation here is that economics was liberated from making normative claims, which freed it to move naturally in the direction of positivism. Smith’s originality was not rooted in the newness of his ideas as much as in the way he reassembled them to create something new. Through his innovation Smith severed the mercantilist unity between politics and economics; economics was now free to develop its own disciplinary foundations. To recap for a moment, then, the progression of Smith’s ideas follows the pattern of first eradicating moral boundaries, then constructing political boundaries, and finally developing economics into a respectable science. In order to analyze economics, Smith’s focus needed to shift away from the social arena. The nineteenth century witnessed the development of specialized social sciences such as economics that were not ostensibly interested in providing a grand framework or spectrum by which to analyze social behavior.

This was the time when economics first demonstrated “colonizing tendencies” by neglecting its earlier mission to function as the integrating center for the other social sciences.

The Colonizing Tendency of Economics

All social sciences are subject to the law of decreasing marginal returns, and economics is no exception to this rule. The specific themes of analysis and the profound level that may be reached tend to decrease over time. In the early development of economics, economists explored new territories by using models based on axioms such as the egoism of the agent and rationality in economic decision-making. The maturity of the paradigm was accompanied by a reduction in the fields still undiscovered by science. Since this time, economists have been working on almost the same themes that Adam Smith announced in The Wealth of Nations. By force, the results each time had to be poorer, decreasing the possible areas of exploration.

These pioneers directed their attention in diverse directions. The tendencies are obvious in authors such as Augustin A. Cournot, with respect to mathematics, and are particularly intense in the work of Edwin Chadwick, a pioneer in the economic analysis of law and of public goods (e.g., railway systems and water suppliers). But the field of sociology is where the most interesting developments have been made, particularly following J. S. Mill’s attempt to elaborate an economically based sociology.

Nevertheless, it was the intense development of economics in Victorian England that sparked controversy over the range and applicability of its method. As one of the newest eighteenth-century social sciences, economics enjoyed a privileged position in the university because of its rigor and practicality. The debate within the newly emerging social sciences over which social science discipline was greater was especially intense among sociologists and economists. These discussions raged among the intellectual disciples of Adam Smith, but it was J. S. Mill, Alfred Marshall, and John Maynard Keynes who gradually won the battle for the autonomy of economic science.

This separation or initial demarcation of fields produced a notable change in the direction of economic science, which can be characterized as a gradual turn from “interdisciplinary” positions (e.g., Smith analyzing the sources of the wealth of nations) to more specialized and inclusive projects from the relation of economics to the rest of the social sciences (e.g., the formation of prices). It follows logically from the development of economics as an independent science that it would refine its analytical techniques and clarify its disciplinary objectives.

The interrelation and overlapping of scientific disciplines-a soft imperialism-is a phenomenon common to all social sciences, but economics has an advantage that is added to its pioneering character, namely, to go forward in relation to the other social sciences. The advantage that economics has over the other social sciences is its simplicity. The theoretical economists are, by definition, creators of descriptive models of reality. The key for a successful construction of systems or models has to do with the model’s simplicity and demand for instrumental order: Simpler phenomena are easier to understand than complex phenomena. The question of a model’s simplicity is not exhausted by the logical consistency of mathematical rigor. There is something more important: Economic science has known how to maintain a firm nucleus (core assumptions) of axioms that are the base of any analysis. I am referring to the hypothesis of optimization, equilibrium, and rationality in decision-making, which implies a stability of preferences.

One of the essential differences that economics maintains from other sciences is the standardization of the previously mentioned basic axioms, guaranteeing the internal coherence of economic models used to reach a reasonable level of generalization. The combination of these axioms influencing any economic prediction means that the falsification of a prediction does not directly address a model’s core assumptions; it simply suggests refining the model.⁹ This distinction is shared by many sciences attempting to immunize the science’s fundamental principles against specific critiques. Thus, a model’s basic hypotheses, assumptions, or axioms are never the objects of falsification.

Mathematics is a powerful symbol of the internal logical consistency that economics has developed during this century. Nevertheless, it has been accused of making a non-critical use of mathematical methods and of converting these methods into a weapon of economic imperialism. One should be cautious when referring to the mathematizing of economics. To support its position within the category of sciences, economics has been forced to accept the onslaught of mathematical methods. Perhaps it has gone too far in this direction, but the way to critique this would have to be based on principles such as: to conduct “good” economics without unnecessary mathematics; or possibly to show the vacuity in the mathematical foci under certain circumstances. The problem is shown to be non-existent when the true dimensions are reduced: to make good/bad use of mathematical normalization.

In all, the critique of positive economics often adopts other forms-for example, that the science of economics had finished in a steep canyon without exit where political economy had been replaced by econometrics; that the areas of economics have been converted into annexes of the exact sciences; and that the recruitment of personnel in large financial engineering and stock market trading firms is composed of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians. A correction of the totality is not valid, but it should be asked whether the use of this technique adds anything that we did not already know. The idea of economic imperialism appears to disregard the followers of certain currents at the margin of neoclassic orthodoxy such as the movement known as socio-economics. This disposition is motivated by the neoclassic tendency to apply the criteria of economic rationality to non-economic behavior such as maternity or religion. The neoclassical quest for exactness has gone from simplification to the loss of contextual references. The conclusion is straightforward: The neoclassical attempt to understand non-economic behavior in an exclusively rationalist way is unacceptable.

To avoid confusion, it may be helpful to clarify that the idea of economic imperialism is really nothing more than a descriptive label. The idea is an outgrowth of the concept of homo economicus (together with the marginal analysis), that has permitted economics to invade the boundaries of other social sciences. But this-in itself-is neither good nor bad; it simply is.¹⁰ This fact-taken by itself-is no more fearful than the roundness of the earth. However, the expansion of our field of analysis is indeed relevant, thereby gaining something in terms of knowledge, which enables us to come that much closer to the truth.

If we measure the success of a science by its capacity to explain a more or less wide range of phenomena, economics is the science that has had the most success among all the social sciences. Likewise, this success is closely connected to the idea of homo economicus (HE). Of course, this idea is nothing more than a methodological artifice-a useful supposition. It would serve as a motive for happiness if economic definitions (based on the HE hypothesis) were better, from the empirical point of view, than the alternatives. A critique of such imperialism would have to demonstrate that the new economic foci have not advanced-that they are logically inconsistent-inconsistent with the facts or something of the sort. If, in fact, they aspire to make any sense, they would have to be empirical critiques, performed on a case by case basis.

There are two cases that illustrate what might qualify as being scientific-one of which was more successful than the other. The successful example is taken from the theory of public election. James Buchanan examined the logic of the democratic process and its relation to the action of large social groups.¹¹ Perhaps less promising have been the results obtained by Gary Becker in the area of the economics of the family, which demonstrate how the seemingly unrelated aspects of economics impact the family.

The Perplexity of the Economist with Respect to Moral Behavior

Given the imperialistic tendency of economics, it makes sense that the concept of homo economicus has been applied explicitly to the area of ethics. One could consider, perhaps, that the discipline is returning once again to its origins and that it will find itself resembling the moral science from whose womb it was born.

In pre-capitalist societies, society was viewed holistically, with religion and morality acting as the glue that held individuals and institutions together. Later, due largely to secularization, politics replaced religion and morality as the principal factor in social cohesion. Economics grew progressively, reinforced by its method until it became an autonomous science. Today, after the long road of three centuries, it seems that we have found a new pact; the difference now is that economics has forced the issue of its hegemony upon the other social sciences. The current preponderance of economic analysis of social phenomena does not seem to be excessive; the process was motivated by the status of respectability that the discipline began to acquire along with its rising status.

The reunion between ethics and morals is apparent in the benevolent nature of the man for whom life has gone well, with the old friend from infancy coming less to his aid. Finally, ethics-separated from political and economic boundaries-is allowed to enter the economics department through the back door without drawing attention to itself in order to perform its necessary tasks. Like the clandestine immigrant, the contract is temporary, and at some point it will have to be considered whether its services are still required.

This invasion into the area of ethics by economics has taken place at distinct levels. In the first place, the ethical dimensions of economic behavior must be seriously considered: If we suppose that all persons are egoists-i.e., they act for personal ends-what sense does it make to speak of ethics? From this point derives the idea that ethical norms are principally mutually beneficial accords whose final intent has to do with maximizing individual well-being in situations characterized by interdependence.

The search here is not to discover the rules for the good life; it is, rather, to understand why individuals from diverse cultures typically adhere to certain self-imposed ethical rules that are constant (inter-culturally) with universal ethical behavior. This raises a question, however: From where does ethical behavior derive? Moral codes are not static entities that remain fixed for all time but evolve with changing economic and social conditions. In fact, even the most homogeneous society normally encounters social conflict concerning ethical beliefs and practices.

Recently, a number of economists have considered how moral codes evolve.¹² The central idea is that economic life requires cooperation between agents, and that both encourage morality and are facilitated by it. Moreover, cooperation, initially, is based on self-interest, sanctions, and mutual policing, but in the course of time, as social conventions arise, it acquires a moral dimension. This focus, which can be called the positive theory of ethics-does not always appear to be descriptive. Often it is nothing more than an implicit argument that underlies an explicitly normative framework.¹³ Ethics maintains a role within positive economics because ethical commitments affect individual choices and, therefore, also economic outcomes because economic institutions and policies affect ethical commitments.¹⁴ Economists do not deny that individuals live under a societal moral code, but they tend to believe that this implicit moral framework can be excised from economic analysis-whether pure or applied-with little analytical loss.

On the other hand, the concept of homo economicus has been used with an openly normative connotation. This would entail constructing an ethics for human beings inspired by the concept of HE, and by delineating rules to be followed in particular situations, which would mean constructing a system of moral norms from the reference point of HE disregarding (more or less) traditional moral and religious precepts.

Normative judgments and ethical premises are often presented in economic analysis, but this is rarely the result of a conscious commitment to a particular ethical stance. As a community of scholars, economists speak in this way not so much out of a shared ethical commitment, but rather because of the manner in which their shared theoretical framework views the world.¹⁵ Economists do not need to understand the concepts and criteria that guide the evaluation of economic outcomes and processes, but this does not mean that ethics does not play an important role with respect to economics. In fact, it is impossible to be a good economist without doing some ethical analysis.

In any case, from the perspective of economics, traditional morals might be preserved only if they make sense within the utilitarian-contractual scheme. An example of this focus could be the work of D. P. Gauthier and, in part, the work of James Buchanan (although this has more to do with a positive than normative theory of ethics). Gauthier affirms that “the well-functioning of a market economic order does apparently not need any specific moral behavior. Even a minimal moral would not be necessary.”¹⁶

The utilitarian-contractual tradition conceives moral behavior to be the result of rational bargaining among well-informed and self-interested actors. If we suppose that such agents lack the means to make interpersonal utility comparisons, then they would agree to distribute the gains from cooperation in accordance with a principle of “minimax relative concession.”¹⁷ This principle would distribute fairly the gains from social interaction relative to the situation that would prevail in the absence of agreement. Buchanan’s basic idea is that economic participants are better off when they share in a portion of the firm’s work; thus, the ethical aspect arises from people working more and saving more as a means of improving their individual and collective well-being.¹⁸ Because of their anonymous character, market transactions cannot be governed by moral responsibilities of a personalized nature. What is required, then, is a set of general ethical principles such as universal honesty and respect for laws and conventions governing exchange. The foregoing demonstrates the difficulty of developing an ethical framework for conducting economic exchange in a publicly credible fashion, while also maintaining some degree of moral transcendence. Therefore, it may be asked why such ethical conduct spontaneously surfaces between individuals.

A number of recent studies have found that economists behave in a more self-interested fashion than non-economists: First-year graduate students in economics were much more likely than other graduate students to free-ride in experiments that called for private contributions to public goods.¹⁹ In my opinion, here rests the essence of the problem we are describing. It is well-known that among economists there is a growing interest in ethics. But the characteristic feature of this economic and ethical analysis is its diverse interdisciplinary character, particularly with respect to sociology²⁰ and philosophy.²¹

What seems to prevail among the ranks of “pure economists” is an attitude of perplexity toward moral or ethical behavior. The lack of accurate and suitable tools for understanding ethical behavior does not encompass the entirety of the problem. Some economists suffer from a deeper inability to understand what ethical behavior is, which, perhaps, explains why economists have begun to focus increased attention upon the relationship between ethics and economics. The most problematic aspect of delineating an ethical approach to economics has to do with determining ethical starting points and with the formation of beliefs; existing economic models of ethical behavior have not dealt adequately with the subject of belief formation.

Conclusion

Economists are becoming increasingly interested in the analysis of moral behavior because of the difficulty in successfully applying the concept of homo economicus in ethical situations. Some research explains a formal representation of this behavior in terms of maximizing the utility function subject to restriction. However, in general, a bearing of curiosity and perplexity dominates in such conduct.

Ethics and morality figure prominently in economic life, but that influence has been largely ignored until recently. Despite major advances in game theory, contracts, and organizations, the subject of economics is still dominated by the traditional assumption that agents are entirely self-interested and unconstrained by moral considerations.

In this article we have analyzed how one can interpret this renewed interest in ethics within the field of economics as the natural end of a process of mutual relationships that was severed when economics became an autonomous science. We saw that the distinct phases of this process of emancipation culminated in the work of Adam Smith, which, in turn, enabled the discipline of economics to invade the boundaries of other social sciences. This phenomenon was called the imperialism of economics. In the last twenty years economists have increasingly applied their analytical techniques to the resolution of social ethical problems. It is within this nexus that the apparent re-unification of the two sciences can be observed; however, the circle is again closed.

Nevertheless, the conclusion of this article is that it is impossible to speak in these terms for two reasons: First, the character and content of the old ethics has little to do these days with moral behavior. Furthermore, the roles have changed: Economics is now the social science with the greatest academic and cultural prestige, while it was ethics that once had priority during the first stage of the process. Ethics exercised its control with a holistic view of society, whereas the focus has now changed to analyze why individuals from different cultural backgrounds adopt similar ethical and cultural norms with respect to moral behavior. It is also possible to develop a normative vision connected with the structure of homo economicus. In any case, it seems that this should not be considered more than a mild colonization of economics over ethics.

Notes

1. James M. Buchanan, Ethics and Economic Progress (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).
2. Amartya Sen, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1977): 317-433.
3. Amartya Sen, On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 7, 9.
4. Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson, “Taking Ethics Seriously: Economics and Contemporary Moral Philosophy,” Journal of Economic Literature XXXI (June 1993): 723.
5. L. Udéhn, “The Limits of Economic Imperialism,” in Interfaces in Economic and Social Analysis, ed. U. Himmelfarb (London: Routledge, 1992).
6. Sen, On Ethics and Economics, 2.
7. R. Rowthorn, “An Economist’s View,” in Economics and Ethics?, ed. P. Groenewegen (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 28.
8. Ibid.
9. This claim is contested by Sen: “The wide use of the extremely narrow assumption of self-interested behaviour has seriously limited the scope of predictive economics and made it difficult to pursue a number of important economic relationships that operate through behavioural versatility.” On Ethics and Economics, 79.
10. The reason is that “even the oddly narrow characterization of human motivation, with ethical considerations eschewed, may nevertheless serve a useful purpose in understanding the nature of many social relations of importance in economics.” Ibid., 9.
11. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).
12. See Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1973); R. Sugden, The Economics of Rights, Co-operation and Welfare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); and R. Rowthorn, An Economist’s View, 28.
13. The proper question is: “Does the so-called ‘economic man’, pursuing his own interests, provide the best approximation to the behavior of human beings, at least in economic matters.” Sen, On Ethics & Economics, 16.
14. Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson, Economic Analysis and Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 214.
15. F. Gill, “Comment: On Ethics and Economic Science,” in Economics and Ethics?, ed. P. Groenewegen (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 153-54.
16. D. P. Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 83.
17. Hausman and McPherson, “Taking Ethics Seriously,” 710.
18. Buchanan, Ethics and Economic Progress.
19. G. Marwell and R. Ames, “Economists Free Ride, Does Anyone Else?: Experiments on the Provision of Public Goods, IV,” Journal of Public Economics 15, 3 (1981): 295-310.
20. Amitai Etzioni, The Moral Dimension: Towards a New Economics (London: Macmillan, 1988).
21. See Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

Jesus M. Zaratiegui
Professor of Economics
University of Navarra, Spain

• Leave a comment... (0)

A. Meditation as a Means to Knowledge

It is common for western experimental psychologists to equate any use of the mind for self investigation with introspection, a mode of inquiry to which we are understandably allergic. Introspectionism as a school of psychology, made popular by the nineteenth-century psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, failed definitively to provide a basis for experimental psychology. The reader has probably discovered the problem with what we call introspection for him or herself many times. When one simply tries to introspect, to look inward, about a problem for example, the chances are that one finds one’s thoughts going round and round, and the best one can hope for is to think some additional, hopefully satisfying, thought about one’s thoughts. Without a proper method we are caught in our conceptual systems. It is precisely to cut through such introspection that various meditative techniques were discovered.

A second misleading picture of meditation held by westerners involves dissociation of mind and body: trance, hypnotism, ‘mystical’ experiences, and altered states of consciousness. While such states must be included in any psychology of the whole of human capacity, they are no more central to what the meditative traditions have to tell us about knowing than any other human state or activity.

Perhaps the simplest contrast to both introspection and dissociation is the meditative methods called mindfulness. Mindfulness is a term used in some of the Buddhist traditions, particularly Theravada, some Zen, and by some Tibetan teachers. Mindfulness is described as experiencing what mind and body are doing as they are doing it, being present with one’s mind, body, and energy in their ordinary states of occurrence. A related concept from the more bodily oriented practices, such as the martial arts, is integration in which body, energy, mind, intention, awareness, and action come to form one nonfragmented, integrated whole. Whatever the terminology or school of meditation, in my observations, meditative techniques of concentration, calming, alert observation, and integration render people more viable instruments of self-observation. What then is the portrait of the human that emerges from the meditative traditions? I will trace the evolution of this portrait and what it has to tell us about modes of knowing though several stages of development.
 
 

B. Discoveries of the Beginning Mediator

Attention. Beginning meditators are usually shocked. Their first and immediate discovery is often about the nature of attention. Mental contents change rapidly and continuously: thoughts, sensations, feelings, worries, daydreams, inner conversations, sleepiness, fantasies, plans, memories, theories, emotions, self-instructions about the techniques, judgements about thoughts and feelings, judgements about judgements. All meditators who sit still and use a mental technique, regardless of their tradition, purpose, or technique report these kinds of experiences. This is a point easily discoverable also by the nonmeditating reader; simply notice what the mind is doing as one tries to keep attention on some simple mental, or even physical, task.

Even more pointed than noticing the constant shifting of attention is the discovery that attention is, for the most part, indirect. That is, the mind is not sharply present with its experiences as they are happening but rather drifts about not noticing that it has left its assigned object or task until the meditator or task oriented person ‘comes back’ with a ‘jerk’ to the present. Then the meditator realizes, not only that he had been ‘away’, but that while he was wandering, he was not really aware of what he was thinking or feeling; he now only remembers what had been going on in his mind through a haze of summarizing concepts and judgements. This is not merely the case for unpleasant experiences from which one might expect a person to want to dissociate. Even the simplest or most pleasurable of daily activities eating, walking, talking with a friend tend to pass rapidly in a blur of commentary as one hastens to the next mental occupation. (just notice what your mind does at the next meal).

In the cognitive science portrait of the mind, knowing was indirect. Now we see one experiential basis for modelling it in this way. However, meditators (or anyone else) can only discover the indirectness of attention by contrast, that is, by experiencing moments of being present which are less indirect than the moments of wandering. Thus an alternative experience, one of directness, has its birth at the same time as the experiental discovery of indirectness.

The self. When meditators begin to notice themselves, even if they are being explicitly taught about nonself in the Buddhist tradition, what they tend to report is amazement at the power and ubiquitousness of their self-concern. Thoughts, memories, plans, goals, hopes, fears, judgements, etc., all are about oneself or others important to oneself. The constantly shifting emotive tone of experience centres on judgements of whether events are good, bad, or irrelevant to oneself.

And who or what is this self? Leaving theories aside, let us contemplate a given moment of experience. We ordinarily take experience to be composed of at least two aspects: subject and object, perceiver and thing perceived. And, as the discovery of self-referencing has shown, the object of perception is normally seen as either desirable or threatening or boring to the perceiver who then has impulses to get the desirable and avoid or destroy the undesirable. This is a relatively simple point (William James, for example, noticed it), which can be readily verified by the reader: just look at something, say the wall in front of you. Isn’t there some sense of a looker, perhaps located in the head behind the eyes, looking at an object spatially located outside yourself? Now try looking at an emotionally relevant object such as your relationship, favorite food, enemy, or an irritating appliance.

Thus in the ordinary experience of the self, we see the basis for the separated knower and wanter of cognitive science models. However, any meditator who gets close enough to experience to begin seeing this knower and wanter in action also begins to feel a kind of vertigo of the knower and curiosity about the wanter. Who is it who is seeing that see-er who is looking at the wall – a second see-er? Beginning mindfulness meditators may try to become such a second looker, a stance which is quite awkward. But if I am not such a second separate and temporally continuous knower, then who is it about whose fate I am so emotionally concerned? What is knowing and wanting? Again, as with attention, the very discovery in experience of the cognitive sciences’ separated knower and wanter brings with it a sense of the limitations of this approach to understanding.

The body and emotions. Experience of the body and experience of emotions are aspects of the knowing and feeling self so pointedly confusing to beginning meditators that these areas deserve special comment. Is my body a part of myself as subject or is it an other, a separated object of experience? Where is the mind when I am ’spaced out’ and not ‘in’ the body? Isn’t it odd that I can feel alienated from something as much part of me as my own body? What do all of the mind/body issues of philosophy actually mean experientially?

Even more puzzling is the relation of a person to his or her emotions. At the same time that people identify themselves with an emotion they may also be seeing that emotion as an other, as something outside of themselves of whose ‘attack’ they can be afraid. Both the body and emotions are boundary areas where the model of the separated knower and wanter is still in operation but is strained. Such issues become matters of living contemplation for meditators, especially Buddhist meditators whose tradition may point them toward these conundrums.

Goal-directedness and action. The mind becomes acutely uncomfortable without goals, without something toward which the cognitive and emotional system is aiming. That is why satisfied desires no longer please, and new desires constantly spring up. Meditators discover this as, sooner or later, their peace-providing meditation technique becomes irritating or boring and the mind reaches out, over and over again, for something else, some goal, something to do.

This constant activity of mind appears directly related to action. In fact, some Theravada Buddhist mindfulness techniques direct the meditator to slow all actions to a crawl and carefully observe the impulses and intentions preceding the smallest movement. Thus observed, action in general begins to show up as a complex matter engendered by self-referring goals, intentions, plans, evaluations, reasoning, strategies, doubts, and efforts. Is this not the very picture of the cognitive scientist’s models of action? ‘Yet is all this required for actions?’ the meditator may begin to wonder? Does the popping up of a thought in the mind require preceding plans and efforts to think that thought? Does one get out of bed in the morning by means of thinking about it? Thus, as with the knower and the wanter, the beginning meditator both discovers and comes to question the cognitive scientist’s rule-based view of action.

Interpersonal relationships. Self-referentiality applies to interpersonal relationships. Other people, like any other object of the external world, are the objects of desires, aversions and indifference depending on whether they are seen as good, bad, or irrelevant to the self’s goals. How saddening it is for decent meditators who had thought themselves as altruistic as anyone else to begin to notice the subtle and devious ways in which self-referentiality may manifest. For a mind in its egocentric mode there is no way out of this cocoon of self-reference.

This then is the portrait of the alienated information processor assumed by the cognitive sciences, decried by the humanities, and discovered in experience by the beginning meditator. It is where we first meet Shalipa, cowering in his hut wishing to sleep the sleep of ignorance, eat the food of greed, and terrified of the threatening wolves. It is the mode of knowing, feeling, and acting called samsara in Buddhist terminology, the wheel of existence to which sentient beings are bound by their habits unless they do something to break those habits. Other meditative traditions bear similar descriptions. Most Hindu schools speak of gross or lower levels of consciousness which replicate this picture. The beginning Taoist meditator discovers his Monkey who lives ‘alone in the branches of his small tree world … his environment a blur of the frantic activity created by unchecked desire.’ And western religions speak of sin or distance from God.

As indicated previously, what all this suggests is that the cognitivist model of modern psychology actually has its roots in our basic folk psychology, a psychology which is not a product of the modern (or postmodern) world, nor of contemporary philosophy, nor of social changes, nor of particular customs or cultural values. Does that mean that humans are in a hopeless situation with respect to these matters? To be sure, the cognitivist and folk psychological models stop here with the isolated information processor. However, the meditative traditions do not stop here. What is to come is the portrait of the full human being which is uncovered by pursuing the further discoveries of meditation. Our beginning meditator may have discovered the alienated samsaric information processor experientially, but (s)he did so in a context in which that disconnected and needy self did not make complete experiential sense. Indeed, each time the meditator finds himself as the dualistic information processor, (s)he does so against a background of intuition that there might be an entirely different way of knowing and being. Must not we suppose something like this to have happened to Shalipa if we are to make sense of his perseverance and eventual realizations? Let us look at these further developments in the meditative traditions.
 
 

C. Further Meditative Discoveries: The Process View

Attention can be trained. The ceaseless ungrounded activity of the mind can be pacified and the mind can be taught to hold an object of attention. All meditation traditions acknowledge and sometimes use this. Almost any object of attention can be used: a sight, a mental image, the breath, a mantra, sensations, the body in motion, space. The technique is usually to return again and again to the object of meditation. The mind can be taught not only to cease wandering away from its object, at least temporarily, but also to remain alert while holding it. But then attention has to be further trained, or perhaps untrained, to let go. Holding a particular mental content is not the goal of any meditative tradition, and some traditions teach letting go in other ways. The goal is to develop (discover, click into) a different mode of knowing and being which is available to humans. The attentional aspect of this mode is that the mind appears to have the natural ability to be present with the flux of experience, the knowing and the not knowing aspects of experience, in a relaxed and natural way. From the vantage point of this kind of attention, the self and the other aspects of experience which we have discussed, begin to take on a rather different appearance.

The self is unreflectively assumed to be a thing which abides through time, is independent of other things, and needs to be nurtured and protected by the person who has it. As meditators become more in touch with the reality of their experience, a view of the world in terms of unitary things and events tends to shift to an experience of ongoing processes. For example, experiences that were once assumed unitary wholes (e.g. ‘I was angry all morning’ or ‘I spent the whole night afraid of the howling of the wolves’) are seen to be a sequence of particular, ever-changing sensations and concepts. Traits once seen as part of an independent self are noticed to arise interdependently with circumstances, and those circumstances to arise interdependently with increasingly more extensive arenas of world events.

Such shifts in view are very useful but are not quite the essence of the shift into a new mode of knowing. Who is it that is perceiving these interdependent processes? As previously stated, we ordinarily take experience to be composed of at least two aspects: subject and object, knower and known, perceiver and thing perceived. Initial forms of meditation instruction and of meditation may sound as though they are intended to exaggerate the sense of a constant perceiver, a homunculus who watches and comments on the passing flux of experience. Buddhist instructions often stress watchfulness, and some forms of Hinduism teach a witness consciousness. In order to counteract self-identification with passing experiences or with the personality, meditators might be taught to say to themselves: ‘I am not my thoughts,’ ‘I am not my emotions,’ etc. But this sense of an exaggerated separate perceiver is limited, temporary, and somewhat artificial. Eventually meditators come to see, suspect, or at least have a glimmering that the subject or perceiver is only the subject side of a momentary experience, an aspect of the perception or thought itself.,

This is an extremely important point in the meditation process. None of the traditions teach that meditation is a means of separating oneself from one’s experience – a contradiction in terms at best. Each tradition, at some point, directs the meditator to be in experience but with the broader sense of knowing engendered by the training and then relaxation of attention. A panoply of techniques exist in all the traditions for challenging or pacifying the sense of separateness and for an intelligent destruction of the artificial sense of an observer. The meditator may be told to be the object of meditation (the image, breath, howling of wolves, etc.), or perhaps to try hard to ‘catch’ the watcher, or perhaps to relax and trust completely, or perhaps to perform daily work tasks very very rapidly – the possibilities are limitless. This is a point where, when such teachings are explicit, meditators are likely to feel pushed. An analytic approach to no self can be interesting, but the precise experiencing of the lack of a separate observer is something from which the mind recoils like putting a finger on a hot stove. With perseverance, however, new possibilities for knowing, feeling, and relating can open from this way of experiencing.

The body. In western psychology, physiology, medicine, theology, and common sense, body and mind are generally considered separate things. The body is seen as undebatably material and solid while the mind is a something else, a something whose nature and relationship to the body has long been the subject of much speculative debate. There are several ways in which meditative experiences challenge our notions of the body and of the body/mind experience.

1. The body can be experienced as patterns of energy and space rather than solely as solid matter. To get a sense of this vision the reader might try the following contemplation: imagine your body as a giant and your mind as a tiny traveler inside the body. Progressively increase the size of the body so that the traveler is exploring at increasingly micro levels of structure; then turn the contemplation onto the traveller who is doing the exploring.

2. Body and mind can be experienced in a meaningful way as actually not separate. In that case, the body is described as a part of knowing, as self-knowing, rather than as an inert thing that can be known only from the outside.

3. Bodily energy is experienced as moving in certain channels (as in acupuncture meridians in Chinese medicine). These are experientially quite real, and manipulating them has notable effects (as you may have experienced if you have ever undergone an acupuncture treatment). These channels do not correspond to western neurological maps. When observer and observed are experienced as not separate, the energy flows can be self manipulated without medical assistance.

4. There are certain energy centres within the body (the chakras) which have particular characteristics. Most of the meditative traditions acknowledge the existence of these, but by no means all techniques or all meditators work with them. For those who do, the centres can be of central importance. When perceived or approached with our usual restricted, dualistic mode of knowing, the centres themselves appear constricted or closed, and each centre appears to form the nexus of its own type of neurotic energy. When approached with a non-dualistic openness, each centre can be experienced as the seat of its corresponding broader knowing or wisdom. For example, the head centre, normally the basis of intellectualization and criticism, is said to open to a pure mirror-like seeing, and the heart centre, in which feelings of sadness and grief are often experienced, is said to give rise to the experiences of inclusive, accepting, timeless space and of connectedness to the world.

Emotions. As was previously pointed out, for a mind in its egocentric mode of knowing, emotions are the monitoring of duality, of how the subject is doing in relation to its objects, to its desires and goals, to others, to its world. The slightest threat to the self’s territory (a cut finger, a disobedient child) arouses fear or anger. The slightest hope of self enhancement (money, praise, pleasure) arouses excitement, desire or greed. The first hint that a situation may be irrelevant to the self (waiting in line, meditating) produces boredom. In Buddhism, these three motivational factors, aggression, passion, and ignorance, are what keep samsara operating. They are said to be what keep humans, such as Shalipa, bound to the habitual mode of knowing and feeling.

But in many of the meditative schools, emotions, like other phenomena, are Janus faced. When they are experienced in a non-dualistic, open mode of knowing, they can be seen, it is said, not as problems but as the basic energies of the universe. Some meditative traditions talk of coming to see, tuning into, riding on, being with, or becoming one with the energy level of the emotion and thereby achieving wisdom. Taoism talks of seeing the energy of the different emotions as the very elements out of which nature is composed (how could it be otherwise?) and thereby achieving harmony. For example, anger might be recognized as the element fire which can be used appropriately. In Tibetan Buddhism, basic emotions, when seen in their totality, are the very stuff of the basic wisdoms. For example, the energy of pride is (transmutable into) the wisdom of equanimity. In short, emotions can function as egocentric obstacles or as potent catalysts for wisdom.

Goal directedness and action. The constant discontent of habitual desires and goal orientation obscures the broader, more open sense of knowing of which we have been speaking. Meditation techniques abound to relax, outwit, stun, or perhaps utilize the energy of desire and goal directness of the apparently separated knower and wanter. We ordinarily think of freedom as being able to do, what we want to do following our desires and goals. But meditators begin to see that their goals and sense of choice are determined by habits, conditioning, and circumstances and are anything but free. With great delight people report an occasional experience of what feels like real freedom – precisely when they have done what they describe as letting go of desires, goal directedness and choice.

But without desires and goals, how can there by action? Would one lie in bed unable to get up, even for growing physical necessities? Would one randomly and affectlessly murder respectable people? These are our fantasies about freedom. What meditators, artists (and many ordinary people) say is that it is precisely when they are, even very briefly, without the usual sense of goal directedness that they can act spontaneously in ways appropriate to the situation at hand. For example, it is well documented that people who act heroically in times of emergency (plunge into icy water to save a drowning child and so on) often report that they did not think, decide, or choose but simply did it. Furthermore, such actions may involve skills which the rescuer says he did not know he possessed. Action is not necessarily what we assume it is.

Interpersonal relations. From the point of view of the limited, dualistic, samsaric information processor; relating with other people is a dismal business, which, just like relations with the rest of nature, can only consist (with varying degrees of refinement) of separation, ignorance, aggression, and greed. Meditators say that meditation affects their view of interpersonal relationships. Glimpses of a state in which there is neither separation of the knower nor desire for future goals also reveals the possibility of an open and receptive relationship to people beyond the manipulative streetfighter mentality. I have never spoken with a meditator who was pleased with his progress (an important caveat) who did not mention something about feeling more at ease, more understanding, or more kindness towards other people. Many, including the dissatisfied, have experienced glimpses described as non-separateness, open-heartedness, or compassion. A few individuals appear to undergo a marked change in their orientation to people.
 
 

D. A New Mode of Knowing and Being

Some meditators in all traditions find or glimpse a truly new mode of knowing and being. They variously attribute their ability to do this to factors such as perseverance, relaxation, or special attunement to realized teachers (or deities). The glimpse is generally described, not as a new experience, but as a finding, or tapping into, a mode of knowing and being which was there all along within ordinary experience but which they had hitherto ignored. These glimpses, they often say, are what keep them going. Various characteristics (or noncharacteristics) are ascribed to this mode of knowing and being:

1. It is not a subject/object form of knowing, not located in a knowing subject who knows objects. There is just the knowing; experiences are ’self known.’

2. There is no desire in it, no reaching beyond the experience itself. It is contented, relaxed, adequate, doesn’t care about the concerns of passion and aggression.

3. It has a spacelike or spacious aspect. This experience can be evoked by experiences of ordinary space. (Perhaps that is why humans are so enamored of views and sweeping vistas.)

4. It is nontemporal, not located in time, not localizable in the past, future, or even present, timeless. (For this nontemporality, some traditions use the word permanent.)

5. It has no limits or boundaries. It is not a limited capacity system; capacity is not a relevant descriptive dimension.

6. It is not graspable, describable, conceptualizable, formulatable or modelable; it is a nonconceptual knowing. It is said to be beyond words, beyond concepts, and not an object of the conceptual mind. It is violated somewhat by any description of it including all that is said here.

(It should be noted that the Buddhist term emptiness can be, and has been, used with respect to any or all of these first six aspects.)

7. It accommodates/includes/accepts everything, all content, unconditionally.

8. It is of supreme value, worth everything. When meditators speak of their actual experience, this is the most important aspect, the sine qua non, the reason why anyone would want to bother with boring meditations, arcane retreats, humbling mindfulness, frustrating spiritual groups, or cantankerous gurus in the first place. Our culture and our psychology separate the knowing dimension from the value/emotive dimension as I have been doing hitherto in this chapter. But the experience here is that at the very basis of experience, the two are not separate.

9. Knowledge of the ordinary subject/object, space/time limited world can be from this broader, unlimited, accommodating, unconditionally valued perspective. The more limited known world is seen as not separate from the broader view. This can be expressed as a new epistemological vision of the origin of experience – that relative experience is born afresh each instant out of the ground of this nonconceptual, primordial knowing. Or it can be expressed as an ontological statement – that nothing is ever born or separated from that ground when viewed from the perspective of the broader experience of totality. But perhaps foremost it is a very personal, transformative, deeply therapeutic vision of the inherent value of the world and of experience.

10. When actions ‘come from’ this mode of knowing and being, they happen with felt spontaneity, and turn out to be situationally appropriate, of benefit to others, and sometimes shockingly skillful. This is perhaps the state which is called nonaction.
 
 

E. Integration and Wholeness

In the final vision, all of the aspects of experience which we have treated as separate are seen to form an integrated whole. Cognition is not separate from emotion. Mind and body are not separate. The perceiver is not separate from the perception. Action is not separate from knowing in its broadest sense. Time is not separate from the timeless, desires, from the desireless, nor emotions from the sense of unconditional accommodation. The self is not separate from the rest of the world, from others, or from inherent value. Fundamental value is not separate from knowing, from emotion, from anything. And this very vision of integration is not separate from the fragmented world which does not see but does need it.

• Leave a comment... (0)

3. Emotions and Intentional Objects

What does a mood, such as free-floating depression or euphoria, have in common with an episode of indignation whose reasons can be precisely articulated? The first seems to have as its object nothing and everything, and often admits of no particular justification; the second has a long story to tell, typically involving other people and what they have done or said. Not only these people, but the relevant facts about the situations involved, as well as some of the special facts about those situations, aspects of those facts, the causal role played by these aspects, and even the typical aims of the actions motivated by the emotions can all in some context or other be labeled objects of emotion. The wide range of possible objects is suggested by the many different ways we fill in ascriptions of emotions. If someone is indignant, then there is some object o or proposition p such that the person is indignant at or with o, about p or that p, because of p, or in virtue of p. This variety has led to a good deal of confusion. A long-standing debate, for example, concerns the extent to which the objects of emotions are to be identified with their causes. This identification seems plausible; yet it is easy to construct examples in which being the cause of an emotion is intuitively neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for its being its object: if A gets annoyed at B for some entirely trivial matter, drunkenness may have caused A’s annoyance, yet it is in no sense its object. Its object may be some innocent remark of B’s, which occasioned the annoyance but which it would be misleading to regard as its cause. In fact the object of the annoyance may be a certain insulting quality in B’s remark which is, as a matter of fact, entirely imaginary and therefore could not possibly be its true cause.

The right way to deal with these complexities is to embrace them. We need a taxonomy of the different sorts of possible emotional objects. We might then distinguish different types of emotions, not on the basis of their qualitative feel, but – at least in part – according to the different complex structures of their object relations. Many emotions, such as love, necessarily involve a target, or actual particular at which they are directed. Others, such as sadness, do not. On the other hand, although a number of aspects of the loved one may motivate attentional focus, efforts to find a propositional object for love have been unconvincing. (Kraut 1986, Rorty 1988). Sadness may or may not focus on a propositional object; regret, by contrast, cannot be described without specifying such an object. Depression or elation can lack all three kinds of object. Objectless emotions share many properties with other emotions, especially in their physiological and motivational aspects, but they might more properly be classified as moods rather than full-fledged emotions. Moods typically facilitate certain ranges of object-directed emotions, but they form a class apart.

Finally, while different emotions may or may not have these various sorts of objects, every emotion has a formal object if it has any object. A formal object is a property implicitly ascribed by the emotion to its target, focus or propositional object, in virtue of which the emotion can be seen as intelligible. My fear of a dog, for example, construes a number of the dog’s features (its salivating maw, its ferocious bark) as being frightening, and it is my perception of the dog as frightening that makes my emotion fear, rather than some other emotion. The formal object associated with a given emotion is essential to the definition of that particular emotion. It is also, in part, what allows us to speak of emotions being appropriate or inappropriate. If the dog obstructing my path is a shitzu, my fear is mistaken: the target of my fear fails to fit fear’s formal object. As we shall see below, appropriateness in this sense does not entail moral correctness; but it makes the emotion intelligible even when it is abhorrent. Thus racist disgust, while obviously morally inappropriate, is nevertheless intelligible in terms of its link to paradigm cases of disgust.

• Leave a comment... (0)

2. Feeling Theories

The simplest theory of emotions, and perhaps the theory most representative of common sense, is that emotions are simply a class of feelings, differentiated from sensation and proprioceptions by their experienced quality. William James proposed a variant of this view (commonly known as the “James-Lange” theory of emotion, after James and Carl G. Lange) according to which emotions are specifically feelings caused by changes in physiological conditions relating to the autonomic and motor functions. When we perceive that we are in danger, for example, this perception sets off a collection of bodily responses, and our awareness of these responses is what constitutes fear. James thus maintained that “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and [it is] not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be” (James 1884, 190). One problem with this theory is that it is unable to give an adequate account of the differences between emotions. This objection was first voiced by Walter Cannon (1929). According to James, what distinguishes emotions is the fact that each involves the perception of a unique set of bodily changes. Cannon claimed, however, that the visceral reactions characteristic of distinct emotions such as fear and anger are identical, and so these reactions cannot be what allow us to tell emotions apart. The same conclusion is usually drawn from an oft-cited experiment performed by Stanley Schacter and Jerome Singer (1962). Subjects in their study were injected with epinephrine, a stimulant of the sympathetic system. Schacter and Singer found that these subjects tended to interpret the arousal they experienced either as anger or as euphoria, depending on the type of situation they found themselves in. Some were placed in a room where an actor was being angry; others were placed in a room where an actor was being silly and euphoric. In both cases the subjects’ mood tended to follow that of the actor. The conclusion most frequently drawn is that, although some forms of general arousal are easily labeled in terms of some emotional state, there is no hope of finding in physiological states any principle of distinction between specific emotions. The differentiae of specific emotions are not physiological, but cognitive or something else.

Subsequent research has shown that a limited number of emotions do, in fact, have significantly different bodily profiles. (LeDoux 1996; Panksepp 1998) However, bodily changes and the feelings accompanying these changes get us only part way towards an adequate taxonomy. To account for the differences between guilt, embarrassment, and shame, for example, a plausible theory will have to look beyond physiology and common-sense phenomenology.

Another problem with feeling theories is that they tempt one to treat emotions as brute facts, no doubt susceptible of biological or psychological explanation but not otherwise capable of being rationalized. Emotions, however, are capable of being not only explained, but also justified-they are closely related to the reasons that give rise to them. If someone angers me, I can cite my antagonist’s deprecatory tone; if someone makes me jealous, I can point to his poaching on my emotional property. (Taylor 1975).

Both of these problems – that of differentiating individual emotions, and that of accounting for emotions’ various ties to rationality – can be traced, at least in part, to a more fundamental oversight. Feeling theories, by assimilating emotions to sensations, fail to take account of the fact that emotions are typically directed at intentional objects. This defect is to some extent mitigated in what might be regarded as a more sophisticated “feeling theory” elaborated by Antonio Damasio (1999). On Damasio’s view the capacity for emotions involves a capacity for the brain to monitor the body’s past and hypothetical responses, both in the autonomic and the voluntary systems, in terms of “somatic markers”. The association of characteristic bodily states with past and hypothetical experiences and responses establishes some connection between the emotion and the absent world, but falls short of fully explicating the intentional nature of emotion.

• Leave a comment... (0)

1. Emotions and the Topography of the Mind

How do emotions fit into different conceptions of the mind? One model, advocated by Descartes as well as by many contemporary psychologists, posits a few basic emotions out of which all others are compounded. An alternative model views every emotion as consisting in, or at least including, some irreducibly specific component not compounded of anything simpler. Again, emotions might form an indefinitely broad continuum comprising a small number of finite dimensions (e.g. level of arousal, intensity, pleasure or aversion, self- or other-directedness, etc.). In much the way that color arises from the visual system’s comparison of retinal cones, whose limited sensitivity ranges correspond roughly to primary hues, we might then hope to find relatively simple biological explanations for the rich variety of emotions. Rigid boundaries between them would be arbitrary. Alternative models, based in physiology or evolutionary psychology, have posited modular subsystems or agents the function of which is to coordinate the fulfilment of basic needs, such as mating, affiliation, defense and the avoidance of predators. (Panksepp 1998, Cosmides and Tooby 2000). To date cognitive science does not seem to have provided any crucial tests to decide between competing models of the mind. An eclectic approach therefore seems warranted. What does seem well established in the light of cross-cultural research is that a number of emotions have inter-translatable names and universally recognizable expressions. According to Ekman and Friesen (1989) these are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust (the last two of which, however, some researchers consider too simple to be called emotions) (Panksepp 1998). Other emotions are not so easily recognizable cross-culturally, and some expressions are almost as local as dialects. But then this is an issue on which cognitive science alone should not, perhaps, be accorded the last word: what to a neurologist might be classed as two tokens of the same emotion type might seem to have little in common under the magnifying lens of a Proust.

Another range of models propose mutually conflicting ways of locating emotion within the general economy of the mind. Some treat emotion as one of many separate faculties. For Plato in the Republic, there seemed to have been three basic components of the human mind: the reasoning, the desiring, and the emotive parts. For Aristotle, the emotions are not represented as constituting a separate agency or module, but they had even greater importance, particularly in the moral life, our capacity for which Aristotle regarded as largely a result of leaning to feel the right emotions in the right circumstances. Hume’s notorious dictum that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions also placed the emotions at the very center of character and agency. For Spinoza, emotions are not lodged in a separate body in conflict with the soul, since soul and body are aspects of a single reality; but emotions, as affections of the soul, make the difference between the best and the worst lives, as they either increase the soul’s power to act, or diminish that power. In other models, emotions as a category are apt to be sucked into either of two other faculties of mind. They are then treated as a mere composite or offshoot of those other faculties: a peculiar kind of belief, or a vague kind of desire or will. The Stoics made emotions into judgments about the value of things incidental to an agent’s virtue. Hobbes assimilated “passions” to specific appetites or aversions. Kant too saw emotions as essentially conative phenomena, but grouped them with inclinations enticing the will to act on motives other than that of duty.

Twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy and psychology have also tended to incorporate emotions into other, better understood mental categories. Under the influence of a “tough-minded” ideology committed to behaviorism, theories of action or will, and theories of belief or knowledge, had seemed more readily achievable than theories of emotion. Economic models of rational decision and agency inspired by Bayesian theory are essentially assimilative models, viewing emotion either as a species of belief, or as a species of desire.

That enviably resilient Bayesian model has been cracked, in the eyes of many philosophers, by such refractory phenomena as akrasia or “weakness of will.” In cases of akrasia, traditional descriptive rationality seems to be violated, insofar as the “strongest” desire does not win, even when paired with the appropriate belief (Davidson 1980). Emotion is ready to pick up the slack–if only we had a coherent theory of how it does it.

It is one thing, however, to recognize the need for a theory of mind that finds a place for the unique role of emotions, and quite another to construct one. Emotions vary so much in a number of dimensions–transparency, intensity, behavioral expression, object-directedness, and susceptibility to rational assessment–as to cast doubt on the assumption that they have anything in common. However, while this variation may have led philosophers to steer clear of emotions in the past, emotions are no longer being studiously avoided in the way that they once were. The explanatory inadequacy of theories that shortchange emotion is becoming increasingly apparent, and philosophy is gradually bringing emotion back into its purview. It is no longer the case, as Peter Goldie (2000) observes, that emotion is treated as a poor relation in the philosophy of mind.

• Leave a comment... (0)

One of the central themes that runs throughout the debate on rationality is that of emotions and their purpose. There are a large number of papers and books available on the subjects, and over the next week or so, it is probably worthwhile summarising some of the main points. The particular articles produced here are from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Most of the articles over the next two week will be by Ronald de Sousa.

Emotion

First published Mon 3 Feb, 2003

No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than emotions. They are what make life worth living, or sometimes ending. So it is not surprising that most of the great classical philosophers–Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume–had recognizable theories of emotion, conceived as responses to certain sorts of events of concern to a subject, triggering bodily changes and typically motivating characteristic behavior. What is surprising is that in much of the twentieth-century philosophers of mind and psychologists tended to neglect them–perhaps because the sheer variety of phenomena covered by the word “emotion” and its closest neighbors tends to discourage tidy theory. In recent years, however, emotions have once again become the focus of vigorous interest in philosophy, as well as in other branches of cognitive science. In view of the proliferation of increasingly fruitful exchanges between researches of different stripes, it is no longer useful to speak of the philosophy of emotion in isolation from the approaches of other disciplines, particularly psychology, neurology and evolutionary biology. While it is quite impossible to do justice to those approaches here, some sidelong glances in their direction will aim to suggest their philosophical importance.

I begin by outlining some of the ways that philosophers have conceived of the place of emotions in the topography of the mind, particularly in their relation to bodily states, to motivation, and to beliefs and desires, as well as some of the ways in which they have envisaged the relation between different emotions. Most emotions have an intentional structure: we shall need to say something about what that means. Psychology and more recently evolutionary biology have offered a number of theories of emotions, stressing their function in the conduct of life. Philosophers have been especially partial to cognitivist theories, emphasizing analogies either with propositional judgments or with perception. But different theories implicitly posit different ontologies of emotion, and there has been some dispute about what emotions really are, and indeed whether they are any kind of thing at all. Emotions also raise normative questions: about the extent to which they can be said to be rational, or can contribute to rationality. In that regard the question of our knowledge of our own emotions is especially problematic, as it seems they are both the object of our most immediate awareness and the most powerful source of our capacity for self-deception. This results in a particularly ambivalent relation between emotions and morality. I will conclude with a recapitulation of the main positions defended by some three dozen philosophers of emotion in the past half century.

1. Emotions and the Topography of the Mind

2. Feeling Theories

3. Emotions and Intentional Objects

4. Psychological and Evolutionary Approaches

5. Cognitivist Theories

6. Perceptual Theories

7. The Ontology of Emotions

8. Rationality and Emotions

9. Emotions and Self-knowledge

10. Morality and Emotions

12. Conclusion: Adequacy Conditions on Theories of Emotion

Section 1 to be published on Monday (29th January)

• Leave a comment... (0)